Blackout

12

“This is crazy,” Ray said, startling us all. “What’s the point of us being bottled up like this?”

“I think it has something to do with dying,” Billy told him, smart-assed as always.

Apparently, Ray had snapped out of his fugue. No one was more surprised than I was.

“My point is,” he said, “this is getting us nowhere. We need to come up with some kind of plan. The rest of the world is out there even if we can’t contact them. What we need to be thinking is how we’re going to get word to them about what’s going on here.”

“If they haven’t figured it out by now,” Iris said, “then they’re either blind, stupid, or dead.”

Bonnie nodded. “It’s probably going on everywhere. Even our cells are down and there’s no Internet. I checked. Nobody out there can help us any more than they can help themselves. We need to face that.”

“So we should just give up?” Ray put to her.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But that’s what you implied.”

“Just shut up, Ray. Okay?”

“Frightened little pill bugs that roll up when they’re scared,” he said, meaning all of us. “I expected better. Maybe not from you, Bonnie, but from the rest of you people.”

Bonnie was getting pissed and I could sense it. “Tell you what, Ray,” she said, almost too calmly. “Why don’t you just crawl back into your corner and shut the fuck up?”

Ray shuddered. I could hear him grinding his teeth. “You don’t talk to me like that! Maybe your husband isn’t man enough to slap your little whoring mouth but I sure as hell am and I sure as hell will!”

Billy set his beer down. “Nobody’s going to be slapping anybody’s mouth, Ray. Not even Bonnie’s whoring mouth. I’m going to give you a pass on this because you’re stressed-out and my wife has a way of blurting out the first stupid thing she can think of. But if you threaten her again, I’ll have to knock your teeth down your throat. I won’t enjoy it, but I sure as fuck will do it.”

There was something about Billy’s smooth, easy manner that was frightening. He never lost his temper, never went into theatrics shouting and stomping his feet, but when he said he would hit you, you could be sure he would. It shut Ray up. Bonnie said something else I didn’t catch and Billy told her to quit while she was still ahead.

Christ. If this went on for six months, it was going to be ugly…and bloody. There was no doubt about that. Six days would be pushing it.

After a few moments, Ray said, “We can’t just sit here.”

I heard Billy sigh. “All right, all right. If you’re so unhappy, then feel free to go out there and marshal the troops.”

“Yes,” Iris said. “Go out there. It’s sheer stupidity, but nothing would surprise me with you, Ray Wetmore.”

I decided it was time to intervene. “All right, everybody settle down. Nobody’s going out there.”

But by then Ray had his back up. “I’ll go out there if I please.”

“You heard him, Jon. Don’t try and stop a real man in action,” Bonnie said with a little titter under her words.

Billy laughed. “Sure, I want to see this. Ray’s got balls. He’s a 100% red-blooded American male. Nothing can stand in his way. He’d not afraid of those cables. Show ’em, Ray. Show ’em just what you’re made of.”

Ray ignored them and went to the window, scoping things out. He was really planning on leaving. Maybe the others didn’t see that, but I did. Maybe they thought picking on him would put him in his place and needling him would shut him up, but they should have known better. Ray did not back down. I knew it and the city council knew it. He was nothing if not driven.

“Don’t, Ray,” I said. “It’s too dangerous. Wait for daylight at least.”

“I would, Jon, but having to occupy a house with these idiots is more than I can tolerate.” When Bonnie made a derisive snort, he turned and glared at her, which stopped the words from reaching her lips. Then he looked at all of us. “I’ve busted my ass for years trying to hold our elected officials responsible for the shitstorms they create. I was the first one to lead the charge and I was always on the front line fighting against graft and corruption. Nobody can deny that. I was involved. Goddammit, I was involved! Maybe I didn’t get elected, but I tried and I never gave up. But you know what? I give up now. All those years I did it because I wanted to represent the real people, the working-class people. What a waste of fucking time that was—”

“Ray, c’mon,” I said.

“—you people don’t deserve representation! You’re all goddamn idiots just like the politicians think! Fucking lambs to be led to slaughter! You deserve what you get! Each and every one of you deserve it because you’re all too fucking stupid to question your government! You won’t take the time to get off your cell phones or shut off your stupid reality shows or quit playing with your guns long enough to pay attention to the puppet masters who manipulate you! Fine and fucking dandy! You’re all going to get what you deserve now. And I couldn’t be goddamned happier.”

He started laughing, slowly making his way over to Bonnie, who was shaking now. She was scared and Billy, I think, was scared, too. Ray was on the verge of a breakdown or a psychotic episode. I don’t think even Billy would have wanted a piece of him.

“You people can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “That goes for you, too, Jon. You’re no goddamn better. Now…I’m going to walk out of this fucking house and I really hope one of you will try and stop me. I really do. I’m getting out of here and going back to my house and fuck the lot of you. If God is merciful, none of you fucking idiots will come out of this alive. I only hope you’re the first, Bonnie.”

With that he turned on his heel and went right up to the front door. He unlocked it and stepped out onto the porch. Down the steps he went with nothing but a little penlight in his hand, head held high and shoulders square.

“Well, I guess he told you,” Billy said to his wife.

Bonnie giggled.

“Foolish little man,” Iris said. “He’ll choke on his own hot air.”

I wasn’t really happy with any of them, Iris included. Yes, Ray was a pain in the ass, but everything he said was pretty much true. If everyone was involved in the political process, I suppose the good old U.S. really would have been a country by the people and for the people and not for the entitled and by the entitled. Well, anyway, that was my grand soapbox moment of the day.

Ray had gone about five steps from the porch when he stopped.

He cocked his head as if he were listening. Something out there had him either puzzled…or scared. I pushed in closer to the window so I could see what he was seeing and maybe to call him back. He stood there shining his little penlight around. Against the enclosing blackness, the beam was white as sugar, very bright. It cut through the darkness like a laser. It almost looked like he had a white sword in his hand. I noticed something then I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe it was the angle of the light or the reflection or refraction…but the darkness was not just the absence of illumination, it was something more. I could see it moving around Ray like a mist of coal dust. I saw it thicken and expand until he became a filmy shape.

And then I saw something move out there, something huge.

Ray made a sort of choking sound and maybe I did, too. Before I could so much as call to him to get back inside, that weird blue orb appeared, hovering about ten feet or so above him. It looked like a radiant platter, perfectly circular, a phosphorescent eye of blue-green-white light that was so intense I had to look away.

But Ray didn’t look away.

He stood there, frozen, staring up at it as if he were hypnotized. Maybe he was. That monstrous glowing eye had him and he wasn’t getting away. He didn’t even make an attempt to. The eye, or whatever it might have been, was set in the face of some massive black amorphous shape that moved ever closer to him. Then it took him. It happened very quickly. I saw a multitude of black whipping tendrils like the tentacles of a squid seem to explode out of the darkness. They were made of that same glossy black material as the cables. There were literally dozens of them in motion, undulating and coiling and reaching out with amazing speed. No squid or octopus in existence had that many arms. They took hold of Ray easily, winding him up, seeming to cocoon him.

He screamed.

We all heard him scream.

Iris fell back from her walker and I caught her. I heard her voice saying, “Dear God, dear God, dear God,” again and again. By then, Bonnie and Billy were there, seeing what we were seeing and struck speechless by it.

“Get her out of here,” I told Bonnie and she stumbled away, supporting Iris, taking her through the living room and into the kitchen. She did this blindly, without question.

Ray was a dead man and I knew it, but my mind kept racing in those few precious seconds after the tendrils grabbed him. It was looking for a plan of action, trying to come up with something, but there was nothing. There wasn’t a damn thing I or anyone else could have done. Billy and I stood there helplessly, both trembling, both breathing hard, both filled with a combination of terror, revulsion, and wonder.

We both saw what happened next.

Mere seconds after the thing seized Ray, he let out one last scream and the thing crushed him. There was a sound like a dog crunching through bone and Ray jerked and some fleshy white mass was forced from his mouth. I think it was his stomach. The creature moved off into the darkness and its orb blinked out and there was only that same impenetrable blackness out there pushing up against the window.

I just stood there shaking from head to toe.

Billy kept making a swallowing sound like he couldn’t get any good spit down his throat. “What the fuck?” he finally said and there was a sobbing quality to his voice. “What the fuck just happened?”

But I didn’t know and had I known, I doubted whether I could have unlocked my jaw long enough to tell him. I felt like I was carved from wood. My body was completely inflexible. The tone of Billy’s voice was confused and desperate and god-awful scared. It was the voice of a little boy who’d just seen his puppy get run down in the road. He was looking to me to tell him how such a thing could be, how it could have happened in a sane and ordered universe. He wanted me to make sense of it, to put it into some kind of logical perspective, but I couldn’t and my inability almost hurt me.

I got myself moving and I took Billy by the arm. “We better get the hell away from this window. It knows where we are and I don’t think it’s just going to go away.”

He looked at me. His eyes were wide, his mouth pulled into a crooked line, and his face was beaded with sweat. In the pale lantern light, he looked like one of those characters Johnny Craig used to draw for Vault of Horror: sweaty, staring, broken by fear, on the verge of some shocking truth or dark revelation that would twist his mind completely out of shape. He reached out a hand and touched me as if he was trying to confirm my reality.

“C’mon,” I said.

We had reached the couch when that luminous orb clicked back on just outside the living room window as if someone had flicked on a spotlight. It leered in at us like the eye of a cyclops, filling the room with cool blue light. Billy and I just stopped where we were like frogs captured in a strong flashlight beam. I think it was instinctive. If you freeze up, what’s after you won’t be able to find you. But in that situation, it wasn’t applicable. That thing out there knew where we were and I had a pretty good idea that we could have hid in a closet and it still would have seen us.

Bonnie said something from the kitchen, but I never heard what it was because the picture window blew in. Dozens of tentacles—I’ll call them that—exploded into the room in a shower of glass, looping and twisting and thrashing like downed high-tension lines jumping with deadly electricity. It happened quickly, with lethal speed. If anything, it was like watching a time-lapse of a tree growing roots at hyperspeed—the tentacles seemed to grow into the room until it was filled with them. They were bigger around than my thigh where they fed out of the darkness, tapering to needle-thin points. They were wild and destructive, upending the sofa and tossing the rocking chair through the air. Two of them smashed the coffee table with their weight and others shattered the wide-screen TV and tore ceiling tiles free. The wiry tips of them were like razors. They slit open the sofa and cut deep grooves in the walls.

Billy and I scrambled away and one of them, as if hearing us, came after us like a gigantic python. Its tip slashed at me, missed, and sliced a lampshade cleanly in two. We made it into the kitchen and I kicked the door shut just as the tentacles hit the other side like rustling, writhing vines in a windstorm. They beat against it and I could hear their sharp tips gouging into the wood. Whap! Whap! Whap! Without even having to ask, Billy grabbed one end of the kitchen table and I grabbed the other, wedging it up against the door.

“What’s going on?” Bonnie demanded. “What in the hell is going on?”

“Shut up!” Billy snapped at her, pulling the flashlight from her hand with such force I thought he had yanked her arm out of its socket.

The tentacles were still beating against the door, sliding against it with a smooth slithering sort of sound. I could see the blinding blue light coming under it and seeping around the edges. The doorknob jiggled again and again. Whether that was from the tentacles brushing against it or one of them investigating it, I didn’t know, but I had this crazy image in my head of the creature attempting to turn the knob and let itself in. The jiggling was rather gentle, insistent but gentle…then there was a loud cracking and the knob and its housing was ripped free from the other side.

Bonnie, who was crouched there on the floor by the stove holding Iris, who looked stricken mad, said, “Billy…do something! For godsake, do something!”

Billy looked from his wife to me with utter helplessness. His mouth kept opening and closing like he wanted to say something but nothing came out. He looked like a salmon gasping for air.

Iris crouched there with Bonnie, her eyes bulging from her wrinkled, sallow face like Ping-Pong balls. There was a visible tremor beneath her skin and she kept smacking her lips like she was trying to moisten them. The loose jowls beneath her chin seemed to vibrate. “All of us, one by one, are going to get taken away,” she said. “That’s the way it is and that’s the way they planned it. We can’t hide. They’ll find us. They’ll find us all.”

“Fuck that noise,” Billy said.

He grabbed the only weapon he saw: a broom. He picked it up and held it before him like a lance. The gaping hole in the door where the knob had been suddenly filled with worming motion as one of the tentacles slipped through. About three feet of it entered the room, the tip of it swaying from side to side as if it couldn’t make up its mind what to do. But if it couldn’t, Billy had no such constraints. Before I could stop him, he jumped forward and cracked the tentacle with the broom handle with a solid dull thump. He hit it again and again and it had the same effect as beating a rubber hose with a baseball bat. He knocked it around but it did not retreat.

It just waited there.

We waited with it.

After about five seconds of that and five seconds of Billy smacking it around, I said, “Stop it, Billy. Just leave it alone.”

He hesitated for a second and the tentacle—slick and black and oily—began to pulsate. The tapering sharp tip of it expanded, swelling like a snake that had just swallowed a mouse, becoming bulbous and blunt. Then it opened like a spout and squirted a string of goo at the broom handle. A copious amount of it enveloped the end. Billy still held on to it. The tentacle just waited there, the sticky rope of goo connecting it to the broom end. Then the goo moved. With a slimy, gushing sort of sound it slid down the broom handle towards Billy’s hands. It acted like it was alive and I was reminded of that scene in The Blob where the old man pokes the meteorite with a stick and it cracks open, the alien jelly sliding up the stick and engulfing his hand.

Billy let go of it before something like that happened and the tentacle sucked in the string of goo like a kid with a ribbon of snot, taking the broom with it. Both disappeared out through the hole in the door. For another minute or so we could hear the other tentacles rooting about in the living room and then silence. The blue glow winked out. By that time, Billy and I were huddled with Bonnie and Iris by the stove.

Ten minutes later, the thing was still gone.

“Must have needed a broom real bad,” Iris said and Bonnie broke into hysterical giggling that was about as close to the sound of full mental collapse as anything I’d ever heard.

And the night was still young.